WASHINGTON — The plane hasn’t taken off, let alone crashed, but the pilot and co-pilot are already on the intercom blaming each other for catastrophe.

That’s what’s going on as President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner maneuver toward a March 4 deadline for extending or changing this year’s federal budget. They are issuing preemptive “I told you so”s, hoping to insulate themselves from blame if no deal is reached and the government shuts down.

The president moved first. He rarely issues veto threats, never mind carrying them out. But he ordered his Office of Management and Budget to issue one on his behalf last Tuesday. In essence, he said that if Congress sent him a deep-cut bill like the one House Republicans are gleefully crafting, he’d veto it. Having warned them in advance, he was saying, he couldn’t be blamed if the GOP went ahead.

On Tuesday, Boehner — eager to stay ahead of his Tea Party Republican Guard — answered back. For his part, he said, he would refuse to consider a plain bill to temporarily extend the existing budget in its current form past March 4. Having warned the president in advance, he was saying, he couldn’t be blamed for the shutdown.

So, if there is one on March 4 — and we seem headed almost inexorably in that direction — who will suffer the most politically?

History is not really a guide. The last big shutdown, in 1995, ended up being a clear winner for then-President Bill Clinton, but primarily because of the hubris and overreach of the then-Republican Speaker (and potential 2012 presidential candidate) Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich managed to make the whole drama look like a matter of personal pique. Go back and look at the famous — and, for Gingrich, devastating — front page of the New York Daily News. It showed Newt as a baby with a bottle; politics is a game of comparison, and he made Bill Clinton look mature.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans won sweeping victories last November by taunting Democrats with “Where are the jobs?” Democrats are now throwing those taunts back, saying it’s Republicans who will knock thousands of Americans out of work with their demands for deep cuts in federal spending.

The attacks have caught Republicans at an awkward moment, as they shift their chief emphasis from creating jobs to reducing the size of the government and its deficits. They are finding it hard to claim they can do both at the same time.

Republicans say a smaller government eventually will spur private-sector job growth. Many economists challenge that claim, noting that the government helps pays for research, infrastructure, education and other programs that provide both public- and private-sector jobs. GOP leaders already acknowledge that thousands of government workers would lose their jobs in the short run under the $61 billion cost-cutting bill House Republicans are pushing this week.

If that happens, “so be it,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. “We’re broke.”

WASHINGTON — More than half of the House Republicans voted on Wednesday to earmark $450 million in funds for a duplicative fighter-jet engines that the Department of Defense has repeatedly said it does not need. But a bipartisan coalition, including just over half of GOP freshmen, voted against the F-35 engines, approving an amendment to strip an expenditure long bemoaned as pure pork, but defended by members of Congress from the states who would benefit from the project.

Support for or opposition to the project had more to do with region than party. Members from Ohio and Indiana, where General Electric Co. and Rolls-Royce would build the fighter engines, unanimously backed the extra engine. House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio is an outspoken supporter of the jet engine, but didn’t cast a vote, observing the speaker’s tradition of abstaining. The opposition from inside his party to a pet-project of Boehner’s is a rebuke to the speaker.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) likes to tout his opposition to earmarks. Indeed, since first entering Congress in 1991, the congressman has never requested a single earmark. And one of his caucus’s first moves in the new Congress has been to renew a voluntary earmark ban in the House of Representatives, making good on a major campaign promise.

Yet as CAP Senior Fellow Scott Lilly reveals in a new analysis, “No, He Wouldn’t—Would He?,” Boehner and House Republicans appear to have included an earmark-in-all-but-name for the new Speaker’s district in the newly released House Appropriations Continuing Resolution (CR). The CR includes massive cuts to important programs like Head Start and LIHEAP, but one thing it doesn’t cut is $450 million stashed away for the construction of a Joint Strike Fighter engine the Pentagon doesn’t even want.

AIPAC March 25, 2010
After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH) praised the Israeli leader and reaffirmed the U.S.-Israel alliance. “We in Congress stand by Israel; in Congress we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel,” Pelosi said. Added Boehner: “We have no stronger ally anywhere in the world than Israel.” Pelosi and Boehner both pointed to the threat from Iran as a top concern and an area in which the United States will cooperate with Israel. More…

During the Bush years, members of the far-right would often suggest that liberals were “with the terrorists” if we merely opposed the invasion and occupation of Iraq, or if we opposed the policies of the Republican leadership at the time. In fact, any negative criticism of the president whatsoever was considered unpatriotic “while troops were in harm’s way.” That was the line we heard almost daily throughout the previous decade: don’t undermine the commander-in-chief while troops were deployed in battle. Just don’t. Or Sean Hannity will crush you with his mighty hairline!

But in general, there was this idea among Republicans that liberals were somehow emboldening the terrorists anytime we suggested that it might be a bad idea to eavesdrop on American telecommunications, or that it might be a bad idea to torture detainees, or that it might be a bad idea to invade Iran after having already invaded Iraq and Afghanistan to varying degrees of failure. Either we were with the administration, or we were with the terrorists.

We can debate at another time whether or not anyone is currently “emboldening” Islamic terrorists or putting the troops in jeopardy by constantly accusing their commander-in-chief of hating America, of hating white people, of hating freedom or of hating you personally.

The more important discussion during this groundbreaking week in American history is whether or not legitimate Republican and conservative leaders are instigating and inciting violence against the president, against Democrats, against liberals and, in some cases, against children.

At first, the opening roster of speakers at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference sounded a common theme: How many ways can conservatives — a term re-purposed to describe the Tea Party movement — threaten the establishment of the Republican Party? Given the exuberant response of the CPAC crowd to those who expressed it, you’d be forgiven for thinking you had walked into a gathering of a coherent movement.

Then Dick Cheney, the former vice president, a guardian of the Republican establishment, took the stand in a surprise appearance, and the crowd went wild. When he teasingly said their reception had him thinking about running for office again, they cheered. When he immediately dashed that hope, their deflation was audible.

The speakers preceding the Cheney apparition brought the crowd to their feet decrying government spending and bailouts. The gathering had its own internal, if paranoid, logic. Yet when Cheney appeared, the profligacy and bailout schemes of the Bush administration seemed long forgotten. Never mind that George W. Bush, Cheney’s boss and protege, increased government spending more than any of the six presidents preceding him, including LBJ, according to Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center. (De Rugy, a former research analyst at the Cato Institute and former fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, continues: “In his last term in office, President Bush increased discretionary outlays by an estimated 48.6 percent. During his eight years in office, President Bush spent almost twice as much as his predecessor, President Clinton. Adjusted for inflation, in eight years, President Clinton increased the federal budget by 11 percent. In eight years, President Bush increased it by a whopping 104 percent.”)

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